The Princess in Black and the Mysterious Playdate by Shannon and Dean Hale

The Princess in Black has plans -- mysterious plans. As her mild-mannered alter-ego, Princess Magnolia, she is off to a playdate with Princess Sneezewort. It should be a fun and relaxing afternoon, far away from her monster-fighting responsibilities. But when a cry for help is heard just outside of Princess Sneezewort's castle, the Princess in Black must spring into action once again. With a little help from a mysterious friend, the Princess in Black vanquishes her sneakiest foe yet.

Clocking in at 90 pages, this book falls just inside the Geisel page-count criteria. Is this more of a chapter book than a book for beginning readers? I was just catching up on some professional reading, and read the excellent Horn Book article by Summer Clark, "What My First Grader Taught Me About Reading." Near the end of that article, she mentions giving her son, now fluently reading books at a first-grade level, a more challenging text to read, and watching him stumble over the more difficult vocabulary and syntax. She concludes that "fluency learning isn’t something that occurs and is then finished; it happens in stages, and it depends on the context." Perhaps that is why books like last year's The Infamous Ratsos are still, rightly, honored by the Geisel committee -- because learning to read goes far beyond that first exciting moment when a beginning reader discovers that they know what that first word on the page means. Which brings us back to The Princess in Black. 

Is The Princess in Black and the Mysterious Playdate a book intended for fluent readers? Or does it have a place in the spectrum of books for beginning readers? Yes, and yes. Some fluency is required to be able to tackle the more challenging vocabulary presented in this book, but the book's text, illustrations, and design work hard to help readers along. In the first few pages, readers encounter words like "mysterious," "drawbridge," and "squatted," among others. Some of these words may already be familiar to readers at this level of fluency, while others may require some puzzling out. However, many of them are repeated in the text, and whenever possible, they are underscored by LeUyen Pham's eye-catching full-color illustrations that accompany each page. Moreover, the generous font size, spacing, and leading give each word plenty of space on the page. And finally, The Princess in Black and the Mysterious Playdate wins at child appeal, as the entire book presents an appealing package that readers with an interest in the subject matter (princesses! monsters! adventure! disguises!) will be motivated to pick up and read. There's plenty here for Geisel discussion, that's for sure.